1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to the display of health and status information for complex electro-mechanical systems, and more particularly to the use of heat maps in a carousel to display health and status information.
2. Description of the Related Art
Complex electro-mechanical systems are common across a wide range of industries e.g. aircraft or car manufacturers, chemical processing plants, oil refineries, semiconductor fabrication etc. and products e.g. aircraft, ships, vehicles, weapon systems, surveillance systems etc. Each of these systems include many hardware components from different categories and sub-categories of components and multiple instances of each component. The individual component instances are typically grouped into sub-systems and possibly sub-sub-systems. An instance may belong to multiple sub-sub-systems and sub-systems.
To ensure that the system functions properly and receives maintenance as required, it is important to monitor the health and status of the system. In many instances, the health and status information is monitored by an operator, and thus must be displayed in a manner that is comprehensive and useful to the operator. Typically, each instance of a hardware component has one or more attributes, and values assigned to those attributes, that indicate the current health and status of the component. These values may be numerical 0/0.5/1 or states such as bad/degraded/good.
There are three common display methods currently used for health and status information within the industry. First, a system is organized into a decomposable hierarchy of sub-systems, which allows progressive disclosure of detailed sub-system status. The overall system status is notionally portrayed as a top-level label or icon on the desktop. The icon or label is color-coded and allows the operator to open a sub-window that displays status at the sub-system level. Increasing levels of detail can be presented to the operator by providing access to additional sub-windows. This has a tendency to create several successive sub-sub-windows and can clutter a display.
The second display method consolidates sub-windows and sub-sub-windows by providing navigation through the decomposable hierarchy as an expandable/contractible tree. An example of this type of display is a health and status tree that starts at the system level and has major sub-nodes (branches) for the primary sub-systems. Each sub-node allows the operator to progressively expand the tree branch to lower and lower levels. In the tree, “worst case” status is usually rolled up from the bottom to the top, i.e., an off-nominal component will cause the status for that component to be color-coded negatively, which then color-codes the subsystem for which that component is part of, up to the system level having an off-nominal condition. This creates a searching problem requiring several tree branch “expansions” to find the root cause component when there are several sub-systems as part of an overall system.
Lastly, to help the operator understand the significance and location of the health and status, a geospatial/graphical representation is sometimes used to physically place status icons on a representation of the system. Geo-registering helps provide a physical location cue for each subsystem. Geo-registering can also be used for presenting status information for smaller display devices. A limitation of this method is that at a system-level, this could imply hundreds of status icons on the physical system map. To mitigate this problem, a system can be broken up into geospatial “sub-maps” representing primary sub-systems where the number of status icons would be reduced.